1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to lightweight stowable and deployable structures for spacecraft and other applications and more particularly to a novel wire mesh structure of this kind and to its method of fabrication.
2. Prior Art
As will appear from the later description, the wire mesh structure of the invention may assume a variety of forms depending upon its intended use. The particular structure described is an antenna reflector, specifically a parabolic dish reflector, for a spacecraft.
A high premium is placed on the weight of spacecraft components, such as antennas, which must be traded off against all aspects of the total system performance to obtain an optimum design. This is particularly true in systems requiring parabolic surfaces as antenna reflectors. The technical requirements of minimum distortions for high performance, a need for stowage during the boost phase, combined with exposure to the extremes of the orbital environment after deployment, place severe constraints on the design.
A variety of spacecraft antennas have been devised in an attempt to satisfy the above and other design constraints. These existing antennas, however, fail to fully satisfy all the constraints. For example, antennas having rigid reflector surfaces, such as utilized in the sunflower concept, have the disadvantage of relatively high weight ratios and stowage space difficulty; coated fabric surfaces have the disadvantage of poor electrical characteristics and deterioration in the space radiation environment; and metallic fabric surfaces, in general, have the disadvantage of extreme sensitivity to dimensional tolerances, and are subject to large temerature excursions which cause large thermal distortions and thus result in significant areas of slack mesh between supports.